This time last year, Covid-19 cases were soaring in the UK, hospitalisations were steadily increasing, and the government had tightened restrictions to try to get a handle on a concerning new variant.
Twelve months on, there is a sense of deja vu. A weary public is worried about its festive plans being cancelled, an outcome that would be all the more painful in light of the Christmas party scandal that has enveloped Downing Street in recent weeks.
This time around, the government is pinning its hopes on the booster campaign to hold back a “tidal wave of Omicron”.
Although not a complete triumph, the UK’s vaccination campaign has been a success: it helped weaken the link between Covid infections and death.
However, the decision in mid-July to declare “freedom day” feels less and less like the mission-complete moment foreseen by libertarians within the Conservative party.
With more than 170,000 Covid deaths to date – including 17,000 since restrictions were lifted in July – the Guardian plots the UK’s vaccination progress against government decisions and the fatalities in 2021.
With 2022 around the corner, the one thing that we can say for sure is that a line has not yet been drawn under the Covid pandemic.
Data notes and methodology
UK daily deaths are based on the government’s primary metric sourced from the Covid-19 data dashboard which only includes those deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive Covid test. At the time of publication the latest death count as recorded by the Office for National Statistics – which includes all deaths where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate deaths to 10 December – stood at 173,525 occurences.
Vaccination data is also sourced from the government’s Covid-19 data dashboard. The percentage figure represents the proportion of the full adult population to have received two doses of the vaccine.
The restrictions level is sourced from the University of Oxford’s coronavirus government response tracker. A stringency index score of above 75 is classed as “very high” restrictions level, above 50 “high”, above 25 “medium” and then anything below is classed as “very low”.
